Packet steering/SMP

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 3 Aug 2010, Vincent Hoffman wrote:

> Fasinating stuff. I read http://www.ntop.org/blog/?p=86 to mean that the 
> newer intel NICs had similar capabilities to the Chelsio T3, is it just a 
> lack of driver and control support in FreeBSD or did I misunderstand?

The Intel cards I've looked at often have quite small tables -- appropriate 
for directing packets for virtualization purposes (i.e., a few MACs to 
specific CPUs), and fine for distributing using RSS, but not able to direct 
tens of thousands of connections individually by 4-tuple to specific queues. 
It wouldn't surprise me if newer generations of Intel cards support similar 
features.

If you're interested in high-performance packet capture to userspace, this 
GSoC project might be interesting though:

   http://wiki.freebsd.org/AlexandreFiveg/SOC2010AlexandreFive

Robert